I didn't see any of the Germany-Gibraltar match as there was a Korean themed evening on German TV. Thomas Müller was saying afterwards that he could do without these kind of matches and when your coach and media says it isn't good enough even though you win 4-0, I can understand why. They're playing Spain on Tuesday. It's only a friendly but it'll be a far more intense encounter.

Rothesay Saint wrote:Going to be good to see teams like Iceland and Wales at Euro 2016.

You should probably add Albania to that list

Am I just seeing patterns in noise, or are there tournaments where all the favourites dominate (EC 2012) and other tournaments where a large number of underdogs shine? Surely the performances of Wales and Iceland can't be correlated?

Watching the match I had a similar impression to the first one, Germany did the minimum required to get three points, and unless Scotland had equalised in the last two minutes, the Germans would've have upped a gear and got a fourth. But apart from two matches against the world champions, Scotland haven't done too badly. Won all their home matches and only lost away in Georgia. That's hardly a disasterous campaign. It sucks that they might well be the only team from the British Isles not to qualify, but they've done a lot better than last time.

Win at home against Poland and things don't look too bad unless Germany hand out some points in Dublin (which they might well).

The Bbc very cheekily chooses to illustrate an article about what the US can learn from Denmark with a picture of some Danish football fans.

The girl in the middle looks particularly shocked that they just drew 0-0 at home against Albania. Either that or her mum has just told her how many weeks of pocket money she'd need to save up for a ticket to the next match.

There's been quite a bit of soul-searching about the state of the game in Denmark after the recent campaign. Apart from matches against a demoralised Serbia, they managed just three goals in six matches. Denmark's chances of qualifying for the European Championship may be hanging by a thread, but their chances are still better than the USA's. Bernie Sanders is absolutely right that there are some profound lessons for Americans here; profound lessons about their non-qualification when supposedly minor countries like Albania, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Slovakia and Wales can succeed. These are undoubtedly lessons that they should be teaching in every elementary school in America.